Closing the door to Robbie's room, Grace yawned as she made her way downstairs. She wasn't quite used to the house yet. She wasn't used to the kids yet. It had been a week since she'd woken up in the bunker, and just a few days since she'd finished the house. With Sam, Mary, Jack, and Cas collecting all of the materials she'd needed, she managed to get the work done with magic. What was once an abandoned power plant was now a modest two-story home, with enough room for all of them. She even had her own office, lined with bookshelves. If she moved her collection of Sherlock Holmes novels, she'd be able to reach the door handle, which would allow the shelf to swing out and open into a stairwell leading down to the bunker. There was another entrance to the bunker outside, a tornado shelter covering the entrance that all of the hunters used to get to the war room.
Of course the entire house was warded, both inside and out. Even the inside of the walls was full of warding, thanks to Cas. He was able to scratch Enochian symbolism into the structure of the house, making it one of the safest places on Earth. Theoretically even archangels wouldn't be able to walk in without permission.
She thought of going down to the bunker, but she was too tired to get much work done. As she was standing in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher, the front door opened. "Hello?" Grace froze, instantly recognizing the voice.
"Dean?" She wiped her hands off, jogging to the front hall. Sure enough, he stood there, taking it all in.
"When did we get a real house?" he smiled, wrapping his arms around her. He refused to let go, kissing the top of her head and saying, "Michael let me go. I don't know why, but he let me go. Maybe I annoyed the hell out of him, maybe… I don't know. I woke up in a field not too far from here. He just left." He felt the cold metal of an angel blade at the back of his neck. "Grace?"
"I carried it over from Michael's army in the Apocalypse World," she explained, taking a half-step back to bring it to rest against his jugular vein. "I love you, and I trust you, but you've got to prove you're me something… he's seen inside your head, but tell me something he wouldn't have cared about remembering."
Dean swallowed, trying to come up with something that wasn't a memory Michael would have browsed through. "There's a line of green nail polish on the passenger door handle of the Impala. You were painting your nails on the way home from Oklahoma City when a deer ran out in front of us. We missed it by an inch. I was going to clean it off, but I left it. You mention it every time you notice, but you never clean it off either. Your favorite flavor of ice cream is chocolate chip cookie dough, but if you can find the one with peanut butter M&Ms in it, you always go with that one. You put a couple of shots of whiskey in your apple pie filling, and the inside of your wedding ring says 'I love you - Dean'."
The angel blade clattered to the floor as Grace embraced him. Her voice caught in her throat as she held onto him, saying, "I really thought we'd lost you. When you came back - when Michael came back - it scared me to death. I know you were holding him back, keeping him from killing me. Dean, I - oh, I have to show you." She took his hand, leading him upstairs. Silently opening the door to Samantha's room, she let Dean peer inside.
"Is she…" Grace nodded, watching Dean try to process everything. She closed the door again, taking him to the next room over, where Robbie was fast asleep. Dean looked between her and his son, almost as if he was asking if what he was seeing was real. "He looks just like me," he managed, trying not to tear up. "Gracie…"
Grace shut the door, walking down the hall to their room and closing the door behind them before she started talking. "It might have been something you learned from Michael," she explained, sitting on the end of the bed. "But it's safer to transport individual people, instead of just one. Cas thinks it might be something about the risk of the cells getting mixed up. I'm not sure how it works. But they were five months from being born, and then they were five years old."
"He looks just like me," Dean repeated, reaching for her hand. "I should've been there. I should've been there for you, for them."
"It's okay," Grace assured him, rubbing his back as she leaned her head on his shoulder. "You finished the Lucifer-Michael feud that's been going on for thousands of years. You saved Sam, you saved me, you saved them. And if Michael's gone, it's all done." She paused, telling him, "I wiped their memories, not that they had very many. They don't know about the bunker, or about angels or hunters or any of it. I filled them in with my own memories from when I was little. The beach, the fields around here, campfires, family holidays, but with you and Sam and your mom and Cas. They've been wonderful through all of this."
Dean was silent, staring at the ground. "What are their names?"
"Samantha Mary. That one's kind of obvious. And Robert - Robbie for short - after Bobby. I really didn't want to go with John as a middle name, but I've been trying to think of something that'll work with Cas' name and it just hasn't hit me yet." The two of them sat there for a while, just holding onto each other, incredibly glad to be under the same roof again. Eventually Grace yawned, saying, "I made a pie yesterday, if you want some before bed." Five minutes later, they sat at their new dining room table, Dean wolfing down a piece of pie as Grace tossed around a couple of names. "'Casper'?"
"Like the ghost?" he asked through a mouthful of pie.
"Hmm, maybe not. 'Caspian'?"
"The guy from Narnia?"
"'Cassander'?"
"The other kids would call him Cassandra. I know eight year-old Dean would have."
"I think we might just have to go with 'Castiel'. It's not a bad name. It's unique." Grace smiled to herself, watching Dean finish the last of his pie. It was something she'd seen hundreds of times, in diners and at tables across the country. But she couldn't take her eyes off of him. He was back, they had a real family, and they could have a real life.
"What are you looking at?"
"You." She got up, coming around the table to give him a kiss. "I'm not letting go of you any time soon."
"Good." Dean stretched, getting up to put his plate in the dishwasher. "I feel like I could sleep for a week. Ah, Gracie, I've missed you." He hugged her again, kissing the top of her head as he promised that he wouldn't be going anywhere for a while. "No hunts more than a few hours away for a bit. I'll be around so often that you'll get sick of me."
"No chance of that," Grace laughed.
Dean sighed, wishing they could just go to bed. "We should let the others know I'm back, shouldn't we?"
While the others worried about what Michael's sudden disappearance meant for them, Dean spent most of his time with the kids. He'd even let Grace dispatch other hunters to deal with things he would've gladly taken on only months before. The four of them did as much together as they could, Grace finding quiet moments to slip away to get work done. They passed much of their summer like that, taking weekend trips to neighboring states and bonding as much as they could. It was only at night that they worried, Dean and Grace retreating to her office or the bunker to research well after the kids were asleep. The others would meet them down there with updates on their own research, on recent hunts, on the odd quietness of the angel radio.
Late one night, while Sam and Dean were talking over ancient cases of archangel possession, Grace got up, intent on finding another book in the library. Cas stopped her among the shelves, looking grave. "We don't have much time to talk, but Michael's still in there," he whispered, intent on not being heard by the boys.
"What? I thought he left." Grace set her book back on the shelf, nestling it beside others about archangels and their histories.
Cas shook his head, explaining that, "He's lurking there, dormant, in the back of Dean's mind. The human brain is a lot like this bunker. You've got the regular floors, and then you've got the dungeon. Buried within the dungeon is where we lock up demons when we need to. Imagine Michael's locked inside an even smaller room inside there. Buried underneath so much, Dean doesn't even know he's there."
"Maybe he was the one who locked him away," Grace suggested, crossing her arms. "He was fighting him for a while, and when he came to find me... I know I saw him. I know he won, even if it was just for a couple of minutes."
"No human is strong enough to resist archangel possession. It's impossible. There's always a reason if an archangel is letting their vessel be in charge. Michael's hidden himself for a reason. He could reemerge whenever he wants, but he's biding his time for something. That's what I'm intent on figuring out. None of the other angels I've talked to seem to know why Michael would disappear. I haven't told them everything yet, but this is something you need to know."
"Have you told Sam? Or Mary? Or Jack?"
"Not yet. I thought you deserved to know first."
"Thank you, Cas. Could you, umm, give me a minute? I'll be back by the others soon," she told him, the angel leaving her hidden behind walls of books. Grace sunk to the floor, her mind racing a dozen places at once. If Michael was still there, he was waiting to do something big. He could kill them all out of nowhere if he wanted to. If he could come back whenever he wanted, Dean had a ticking time bomb in his head. There was only one solution Grace could think of. "Chuck, I don't know if you're listening, or if you're even in our universe right now, but we need your help. We did it. Lucifer's dead. You got the ending you wanted. Michael won, with Dean's help. The boys became the vessels, just like the prophecies said. But we have no idea what to do about Michael. He's gone rogue, Chuck. We need you to help stop him. Stop him and save Dean. Please."
She wasn't sure what she was expecting when she opened her eyes. There was no bolt of lightning, no sudden shift in the air. Chuck hadn't materialized in front of her. Nothing had changed. Maybe he had done something. Or maybe he had abandoned them. Either way, the boys were waiting. Grace got up, grabbing the book she had been looking for. When she returned to the table, Dean sleepily looked up at her, raising an eyebrow. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah, why?"
"You were gone for a while, and your eyes are red."
"I'm just tired." She waved it off, saying, "Running after two little kids is somehow more exhausting than running after monsters." She cracked her book open, starting to read. "A couple more hours and then I'm going to bed."